Sstrhsrtj

Edit 1:
The freezing just happened and I was able recover from it. Log(syslog) from the freezing until 'now': https://ufile.io/ivred

Edit 2: It seems a bug/problem with GDM3. I'll try Xubuntu.

Edit 3: Now I'm using Xubuntu. The problem still happens, but a lot less often. So.. it is indeed a memory issue.

I'm currently using Ubuntu 18.10 Live CD since my HD died. I did some customizations to my LiveCD mainly towards memory consumption, because I have only 4GB of RAM.

When my free memory goes below 100MB, my pendrive LED starts to blink like crazy and the system freezes letting me time to just get out of GUI interface (ctrl + alt + f1-12) and reboot(ctrl + alt + del) or, sometimes to close Google Chrome with sudo killall chrome.

So I created a very simple script to clean the system cache and close Google Chrome. Closing Chrome out of the blue like that is fine, since it asks you to recover the tabs when it wasn't closed properly.

The question: It works like a charm 95% of the time. I don't know if my script is too simple or there is another reason for this intermittent freezing since I can't check the log, because of the need of reboot. Is there a more efficient way to do that? Am I doing it wrong?

Obs.: I have another script to clean the cache that runs every 15 minutes. Since I created those scripts I am able to use my LiveCD every day with almost no freezing. Maybe 1 per day.. Before that I had to reboot every 30-40min, because I use the Chrome with several tabs.

My script:

#!/bin/bash 



while true ; do 

free=`free -m | grep Mem | awk '{print $4}'`

if [ "$free" -gt 0 ]

 then

    if [ $free -le 120 ]; #When my memory consuptiom goes below 120MB do the commands below. 

     then



if pgrep -x "chrome" > /dev/null

then

        sudo killall -9 chrome

        sudo su xubuntu

        /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --password-store=basic --aggressive-cache-discard --aggressive-tab-discard

else

    echo "Stopped"

fi



    sudo sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3

        sudo sync && echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches 







    fi

fi & sleep 1; done

The solution that "fra-san" gave at the comments here fitted perfectly. Using "cgroup-tools" package I was able to limit Chrome memory usage successfully. I tested it opening dozens of tabs at the same time and I could see the memory limit in action. However, I had to leave my script running, since, as much as I mostly use Chrome, system cache consumes a lot of RAM too.

My steps:

1- Used this script from: Limit memory usage for a single Linux process

#!/bin/sh



# This script uses commands from the cgroup-tools package. The cgroup-tools commands access the cgroup filesystem directly which is against the (new-ish) kernel's requirement that cgroups are managed by a single entity (which usually will be systemd). Additionally there is a v2 cgroup api in development which will probably replace the existing api at some point. So expect this script to break in the future. The correct way forward would be to use systemd's apis to create the cgroups, but afaik systemd currently (feb 2018) only exposes dbus apis for which there are no command line tools yet, and I didn't feel like writing those.



# strict mode: error if commands fail or if unset variables are used

set -eu



if [ "$#" -lt 2 ]

then

    echo Usage: `basename $0` "<limit> <command>..."

    echo or: `basename $0` "<memlimit> -s <swaplimit> <command>..."

    exit 1

fi



cgname="limitmem_$$"



# parse command line args and find limits



limit="$1"

swaplimit="$limit"

shift



if [ "$1" = "-s" ]

then

    shift

    swaplimit="$1"

    shift

fi



if [ "$1" = -- ]

then

    shift

fi



if [ "$limit" = "$swaplimit" ]

then

    memsw=0

    echo "limiting memory to $limit (cgroup $cgname) for command $@" >&2

else

    memsw=1

    echo "limiting memory to $limit and total virtual memory to $swaplimit (cgroup $cgname) for command $@" >&2

fi



# create cgroup

sudo cgcreate -g "memory:$cgname"

sudo cgset -r memory.limit_in_bytes="$limit" "$cgname"

bytes_limit=`cgget -g "memory:$cgname" | grep memory.limit_in_bytes | cut -d  -f2`



# try also limiting swap usage, but this fails if the system has no swap

if sudo cgset -r memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes="$swaplimit" "$cgname"

then

    bytes_swap_limit=`cgget -g "memory:$cgname" | grep memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes | cut -d  -f2`

else

    echo "failed to limit swap"

    memsw=0

fi

2- Named it as "limitmem" and copied to /usr/bin/ so I could call it from terminal just with limitmem. Now I can open a process limiting the memory usage to, for example, 800MB using this syntax:limitmem 800M command

In my case: limitmem 1000M google-chrome --password-store=basic --aggressive-cache-discard --aggressive-tab-discard